Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

The plot of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room – shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010 – is of the kind that sears itself onto the backs of your retinas.

Inspired by the case of Josef Fritzl, it tells the story of a young woman (“Ma”) abducted by a stranger (“Old Nick”) and kept prisoner in a shed at the bottom of his garden for seven years. He serially rapes her, fathering a son (Jack), with whom she lives in claustrophobic but loving isolation. Unable to face telling five-year-old Jack the truth about the utter awfulness of their situation, Ma brings him up to believe there is no world beyond the walls which encase them, and devises educational and physical diversions to see them through each day.

Witney White in RoomCredit:
Scott Rylander

The novel, written from the point of view of the boy, was published to almost unalloyed acclaim, and a 2015 film adaptation saw Brie Larson win an Oscar for best actress. Donoghue’s adaptation of her novel for stage, then, sees her going for a treble of accolades. But, for all the care and seriousness that she has poured into the script, and for all the director Cora Bissett’s stylish staging (with superimposed cartoon videos and a revolving set), the whole thing never quite catches fire.

Donoghue’s novel was rightly praised for the way it took us inside the mind of the youngster. For him, the threadbare room was a haven of safety and secure routine, the only home he had ever known. The true horror of his situation only gradually and insidiously crept up on the reader.

Liam McKenna and Witney White in RoomCredit:
Scott Rylander

In the theatre, this is harder to achieve. Without the services of a preternaturally gifted five-year-old actor able to bear the burden of the narrative for over two hours on stage, more practical solutions needed to be found.

Donoghue and Bissett came up with an elegant device – in a winning but unsentimental performance, Fela Lufadeju plays Jack as a grown up, remembering dramatic snippets from his past acted out in front of him by Harrison Wilding (one of three children rotating the role) as young Jack and Witney White as Ma. However, because we must view the action from the point of view of an infant who doesn’t understand much of what is going on, the characters around him remain frustratingly two dimensional.

In an attempt to overcome this and give Ma an emotional voice of her own, the play has been turned into a semi-musical with White (who has a lovely, powerful voice) intermittently breaking into song to convey her hidden griefs. The music and lyrics by Bissett and Kathryn Joseph – aided by a not inconsiderable debt to Adele – are, without doubt, stirring, but ultimately emotive window dressing for a script that struggles to capture the slow-burn depth of a novel in the comparatively short sprint demanded by a stage performance.

You can’t accuse the play of being sensationalist (Liam McKenna’s Old Nick is the antithesis of a horror-film villain; frankly a bit too understated for his own good) and it is clearly reaching towards more universal insights into the complex nature of the parent-child bond. That said, its concluding Lego metaphor (you make it, break it, then make it again) feels about as weighty as Forrest Gump’s wisdom about life being like a box of chocolates.